I have a problem with the hardware configuration and analysis program for our SciTech Display Doctor product. In order to do color console output we are currently using a version of our console library ported to run on top of ncursese. However this is causing us some grief because we need to be able to display messages while we have the console in graphics mode (while we are analysing and testing the graphics hardware and BIOS capabilities).

One easy way to solve this is to use our direct VGA console library which talks directly to the screen. This works perfectly under Linux right now, however the problem is that when we exit we need to be able to tell the Linux console to move the cursor location to the new location that our console library has changed it to, so that it does not overwrite our messages on the screen. Hence I am wondering if there is a kernel call that we can make to move the console cursor location? Alternatively how can we simply always move the console cursor location to the bottom of the screen (some kind of escape code?).

Also is there a kernel call that we can use to disable the console scrolling which is done with the hardware panning registers? I know that switching virtual consoles does this, and we would like to be able to clear this before displaying our messages...